Hell Let Loose: Vietnam launches on August 13 with full crossplay between PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S – and unlike the original game, the decision about who gets to join your server is yours. Team17 has confirmed that server owners can restrict platform access, which means every community planning a Vietnam server has a real choice ahead of day one. This guide covers what the options are and how to think about them. We'll add the exact panel steps once live Vietnam servers exist to document – anything we wrote about that today would be a guess.
What Team17 has confirmed
The clearest statement comes from the developer Q&A Team17 published on July 31, in the team's own words: "Server owners will be able to configure which platforms can access their servers, including full crossplay, PC-only or console-only options." That settles it. No "exploring options", no roadmap asterisk.
Around that sit a few other confirmed pieces. Players can form parties across platforms, and they'll be able to filter the server browser based on whether they want cross-platform matches at all. Team17 also said back in April that servers would be "clearly tagged as cross-platform play, PC only, or console only" in-game, so whichever way you go, players see your choice before they click join. The reasoning Team17 gave for offering restrictions in the first place is input parity – the difference between mouse-and-keyboard and controller. And this isn't theoretical: the crossplay playtest that ran from July 24 to 27 already had console-only servers running alongside the default full-crossplay pool, marked with letters at the end of the server name, so the gating has been exercised in public before launch.
That gives you three postures for a community server: everyone together, PC only, or consoles only.
The case for full crossplay
The pool, mostly. A 100-player server is brilliant when it's full and a ghost town when it isn't, and seeding one from zero – convincing the first thirty strangers to sit in a half-empty lobby long enough for the next seventy to show up – is the hardest problem in community hosting. Full crossplay puts your server in front of every Vietnam player on every platform. It also keeps you visible to players filtering for cross-platform matches as well as those who don't care either way.
If your community is social first – a Discord that plays together in the evenings, mixed skill levels, friends across platforms – this is almost certainly your answer. The cost is the one Team17 themselves acknowledged: mouse-and-keyboard players and controller players in the same gunfights, and the arguments that follow. In a game where most engagements are decided by positioning and communication rather than flick aim, that matters less than it would in a faster shooter, but it never quite goes away.
The case for a PC-only server
Input parity, from the PC side. If you run a competitive or realism-focused unit – organised events, scrims against other groups, a rules-heavy server where every fight is expected to be on even terms – restricting to PC keeps the input playing field level and removes an entire category of dispute before it starts.
There's also a practical angle. Community servers on the original Hell Let Loose have always been a PC thing. The game went into early access on PC in June 2019 and didn't reach PS5 and Xbox Series X|S until October 2021, and console players still have no server browser to go looking with – official servers only. So every established HLL community-server culture grew up PC-side. If you're migrating one of those communities over to Vietnam, PC-only preserves exactly what you have today.
The cost is symmetrical with the benefit. You're cutting your recruitment pool to one platform, and every console player who would have wandered in on a Saturday, had a good match and become a Tuesday-night regular simply never appears in your world at all.
The case for a console-only server
The same parity argument from the other direction. Controller players get lobbies where nobody is aiming with a mouse, which is the fairness concern Team17 built the whole feature around. During the July playtest the console-only servers existed precisely because demand for them was expected – Team17 ran Xbox-only, PS5-only and console-crossplay variants.
If you're building a community around a console clan, or you found during the playtest that your regulars simply prefer controller-only fights, this is a legitimate posture and not a niche one. It's also genuinely new. On the original game a console player couldn't join a community server at all, so a console-only Vietnam server isn't a smaller version of the PC thing – it's the first time that crowd gets one of their own. I can't tell you what share of the player base plays on console, because nobody has published that number. What I can tell you is that Vietnam is a simultaneous release across PC, PS5 and Xbox rather than a PC game with ports trailing behind, and that Team17 built the gating because players asked to keep the two separate.
Deciding before day one
Our advice: decide early, and say so out loud. Make the call before launch, write it into your community's rules, and treat it as part of your server's identity rather than a knob to fiddle with later, because a platform-access change after launch changes who can play with whom – and a community that formed under full crossplay will experience a switch to PC-only as an eviction notice for its console regulars.
Two things worth folding into the decision. First, Battalions – the in-game clan system that lets persistent groups track stats, progress together and join servers as a unit – ships after launch, not on day one, so plan your launch-window recruitment around Discord and your own roster. Second, some things about the setting are still unknown: Team17 hasn't said what the default is, or whether it can be changed on a running server. We'll update this guide once real Vietnam servers are in our hands and those answers are testable.
If you're weighing the choice for a server with us, open a ticket and talk it through – we've run Hell Let Loose communities of every flavour on the original game, and we're happy to share what we've seen work.